The only real way to judge the first episode of any new sitcom is by the number of laughs per minute. I managed four in the 24 minutes (including ad break) of Chickens (Sky 1); which is substantially above average, given that some time has to be spent establishing the characters and the sit in the sitcom. Chickens began life as a pilot for Channel 4. Not having seen the pilot, I've no idea why it got turned down, but I'd be willing to bet Sky took a punt on commissioning a series on the proviso that writers Simon Bird, Joe Thomas and Jonny Sweet made it as much like The Inbetweeners as possible.

Chickens is set in the fictional town of Rittle-on-Sea in August 1914, just after the outbreak of the first world war. Much of the pre-publicity for the show has focused on the risky nature of its situation and the way it hopes to invert sexual stereotypes by placing three non-combatant men as a minority in a village run by women. Save that for a dinner party conversation, because Bird and Thomas are basically playing their Inbetweeners characters.

Bird is Cecil, who has been turned down by the army for having flat feet, but could just as well be Inbetweener Will. Both are brighter and better-intentioned than everyone else around, but end up misunderstood and picked on. Thomas is conscientious objector George, but could just as well be Simon, the Inbetweener who takes himself terribly seriously and isn't as bright as he thinks he is. Sweet wasn't in the Inbetweeners but his character, Bert the Bounder, could well have been. None of which is a problem as far as I'm concerned. I loved The Inbetweeners and I enjoyed this. And with luck it will get even better when the characters have settled in and Barry Humphries makes an appearance.

My knowledge of the Hollywood B-List isn't all it might be, so I had no idea who the Tom Hardy of Poaching Wars with Tom Hardy (ITV) was. Apparently he has appeared in several movies I've seen, but his face prompted zero recall though in this he did a passable imitation of Ross Kemp (though with more hair) as he wandered round the South African bush looking simultaneously macho and caring. Though there wasn't all that much need for him to be that macho, as the closest he came to finding a poacher was one that had been filmed by someone else a few months back. The squeal of the dying rhino was haunting.

The lack of any visible adversary proved something of a handicap as, having established that rhinos and elephants are threatened with extinction, rather too much of this programme was taken up with Tom – not least a long and rather dull last section in which he pretended to be a poacher to see how long it would take some trained elephants to track him down – and not enough on the actual nature of the war itself. Tom introduced us to Tumi, who could have been a poacher had he not joined an anti-poaching squad, and a farmer who cut the horns off his rhino, but the lasting impression of this film was of a lot of well-intentioned people pissing in the wind. Perhaps that's the reality. If so, it doesn't look good for rhinos.

But things are possibly looking up for the overweight. For some time now it hasn't just been the fashion industry and the glossy mags guilt-tripping us for our bulk; it has also been the TV schedules, as it's hard to get through an evening's viewing without at least one programme about obesity, heart disease and death. While covering much the same topics, Jacques Peretti's series The Men Who Made Us Thin(BBC2) has been a welcome corrective to the general trend.

It was certainly a relief for people like me, who were categorised as having a normal BMI before everyone decided to recalibrate the index and call me overweight. Though however fat I was, I'm not sure I'd choose to have a body port inserted into my stomach as the man from Malmö in Sweden did, to siphon out each meal 20 minutes after he'd eaten it. Strangely, that wasn't the most bizarre part of the programme: that was reserved for the paparazzi agent who declared that celebs deliberately let their weight go up and down so that they can flog the before and after pics. If that's true, it's an even sicker world than I thought.